Buffalo News, 15 September 2013,
Jane S. Kuntz, retired teacher, active in community,
Jan. 30, 1926 — Sept. 15, 2013
Jane S. Kuntz, of Lancaster, a retired teacher, died Sunday in GreenField Manor, Lancaster, after a lenthy illness. She was 87.
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Monsanto knew PCBs were toxic as it manufactured almost all of them, much like Roundup now. Monsanto drenched the town of Anniston, Alabama in PCBs and never told them. Guess where that pipeline through Georgia from Alabama to Florida starts? That’s right: Anniston, Alabama.
According to CDC
Toxicological Profile for Polychlorinated Biphenyls (PCBs), November 2000,
“Approximately 99% of the PCBs used by U.S. industry were produced by the Monsanto Chemical Company in Sauget, Illinois, until production was stopped in August 1977.”
By Michael Grunwald in Washington Post Tuesday, January 1, 2002; Page A01, Monsanto Hid Decades Of Pollution: PCBs Drenched Ala. Town, But No One Was Ever Told ( original URL no longer works), Continue reading
My father told me about the circus elephant that escaped in Valdosta and ran as far north as Cat Creek, a few miles from where we live, going on 111 years ago. My great-aunt Evalyn told us more; she was 17 when it happened and about 97 when she told us where she was then living in Texas. It seems she got it mostly right, although it’s not clear exactly what the right story is.
Lowndes County Historical Society and Museum, undated, Gypsy the Elephant,
The story of Gypsy the elephant is one of Valdosta’s most bizarre and notable stories. In 1902 Gypsy, a large Asian elephant who belonged to the Harris-Nickle-Plate circus, killed her trainer, broke free, and went on a rampage in Valdosta before eventually being brought down north of town by the chief or police. At the time, the incident was so peculiar that people in surrounding towns accused the citizens of Valdosta of fabricating the entire story for publicity.
Our old family neighbor Albert Pendleton (from when we all lived on Varnedoe Street in Valdosta; way before my time), added: Continue reading
Let these panels never be filled:
We happened to arrive at Auckland Museum at 11AM on the 11th of November. This is precisely the time everyone in the former Empire celebrates the end of World War I, Auckland Museum is a war museum, and 1/5 of all male New Zealanders served in that war: 100,000 of the, of whom 60,000 never came back. So the entire upper floor of the museum was taken over by a comemoration ceremony, involving many folks in uniforms and medals and a Maori in traditional dress marching with them. On the wall of names was an F.C. Quarterman. The records show about 20 others who served, and more than 200 Sinclairs. Let these panels never be filled.
Names:
Continue readingMonsanto is always hiding behind something, starving children (while selling their parents crops that fail all at once), the Great God Efficiency, or now, medical research. Will Clarence Thomas recuse himself this time on this Supreme Court seed patent, Bowman v Monsanto? Will Monsanto manufacture enough Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt (FUD) to win anyway, or will the other SCOTUS judges rule wisely this time?
Andrew Pollack wrote for the New York Times 13 February 2013, Farmer’s Supreme Court Challenge Puts Monsanto Patents at Risk,
Monsanto says that a victory for Mr. Bowman would allow farmers to essentially save seeds from one year’s crop to plant the next year, eviscerating patent protection. In Mr. Bowman’s part of Indiana, it says, a single acre of soybeans can produce enough seeds to plant 26 acres the next year.
Such a ruling would “devastate innovation in biotechnology,” the company wrote in its brief. “Investors are unlikely to make such investments if they cannot prevent purchasers of living organisms containing their invention from using them to produce unlimited copies.”…
The decision might also apply to live vaccines, cell lines and DNA used for research or medical treatment, and some types of nanotechnology.
Yeah, yeah, it could. But it would be quite easy for SCOTUS to say this ruling is about seeds.
Many organizations have filed briefs in support of Monsanto’s position — universities worried about incentives for research, makers of laboratory instruments and some big farmer groups like the American Soybean Association, which say seed patents have spurred crop improvements. The Justice Department is also supporting Monsanto’s argument.
And the American Soybean Association represents big growers who plant Monsanto seeds. Too bad they don’t realize they’d make more profits if they didn’t have to pay for those seeds every year even when Monsanto jacks up the price ( 43% in 2009), plus pay for the expensive pesticides that go on them, and the expensive huge tractor equipment to farm at the scale Monsanto demands. Another group that should know better weighs in:
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Nature is not something
out there, apart from people.
It never was, and nowadays people have built and farmed and clearcut
so much that wildlife species from insects to birds are in trouble.
In south Georgia people may think that our trees make a lot of wildlife habitat.
Actually, most of those trees are planted pine plantations with
very limited undergrowth, and in town many yards are deserts of grass
plus exotic species that don’t support native birds.
Douglas Tallamy offers one solution:
turn yards into wildlife habitat by growing native species.
Since we are as always remodeling nature, we might as well do it
so as to feed the rest of nature and ourselves,
and by the way get flood prevention and possibly cleaner water as well,
oh, and fewer pesticides to poison ourselves.
Douglas Tallamy makes a clear and compelling case in
Bringing Nature Home: How You Can Sustain Wildlife with Native Plants
…it is not yet too late to save most of the plants and animals that sustain the ecosystems on which we ourselves depend. Second, restoring native plants to most human-dominated landscapes is relatively easy to do.
Some of you may wonder why native species are so important? Don’t we have more deer than we can shoot? Maybe so, but we have far fewer birds of almost every species than we did decades and only a few years ago.
Some may wonder: aren’t exotic species just as good as native ones,
if deer and birds can eat them?
Actually, no, because many exotic species are poisonous
to native wildlife, and because invasive exotics crowd out natives
and reduce species diversity.
From kudzu to
Japanese climbing fern, exotic invasives are bad for wildlife
and may also promote erosion and flooding by strangling native vegetation.
All plants are not created equal, particularly in their ability to support wildlife. Most of our native plant-eaters are not able to eat alien plants, and we are replacing native plants with alien species at an alarming rate, especially in the suburban gardens on which our wildlife increasingly depends. My central message is that unless we restore native plants to our suburban ecosystems, the future of biodiversity in the United States is dim.
Tallamy had an epiphany when he and his wife moved to 10 acres in Pennsylvania in 2000:
Continue reading
Higher average temperatures
mean much more frequent droughts and trees dying faster in droughts
because of the temperatures.
That plus pine beetles, according to research from 2009.
Forestry is Georgia’s second largest industry
in terms of
employment and wages and salaries,
more than $28 billion a year
according to the Georgia Forestry Commission,
plus an estimated
$36 billion a year in ecosystem services
such as water filtration, carbon storage, wildlife habitat, and aesthetics,
not to mention hunting and fishing.
Climate change matters to Georgia’s forests and to Georgia.
The paper appeared 13 April 2009 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of the Sciences, Temperature sensitivity of drought-induced tree mortality portends increased regional die-off under global-change-type drought, by Henry D. Adams, Maite Guardiola-Claramonte, Greg A. Barron-Gafford, Juan Camilo Villegas, David D. Breshears, Chris B. Zou, Peter A. Troch, and Travis E. Huxman, 106(17) 7063-7066, doi: 10.1073/pnas.0901438106.
All drought trees in the warmer treatment died before any of the drought trees in the ambient treatment (on average 18.0 vs. 25.1 weeks, P <0.01; Fig. 1A).
They say warmer trees dying faster in drought wasn’t due to a difference in amount of water. Instead, they infer the warmer trees couldn’t breathe.
Combined, our results provide experimental evidence that piñon pines attempted to avoid drought-induced mortality by regulating stomata and foregoing further photosynthesis but subsequently succumbed to drought due to carbon starvation, not sudden hydraulic failure. Importantly, we isolate the effect of temperature from other climate variables and biotic agents
and show that the effect of warmer temperature in conjunction with drought can be substantial.
Our results imply that future warmer temperatures will not only increase background rates of tree mortality (13, 16), but also result in more frequent widespread vegetation die-off events (3, 35) through an exacerbation of metabolic stress associated with drought. With warmer temperatures, droughts of shorter duration—which occur more frequently—would be sufficient to cause widespread die-off.
How much more frequently?
They calculated an estimate for that, too: five times more frequently.
Of course, that’s for the specific kinds of forests they were studying,
and the exact number may vary, but the general trend is clear:
higher temperatures mean more frequent droughts,
like
the year-long drought we just experienced in south Georgia.
This projection is conservative because it is based on the historical drought record and therefore does not include changes in drought frequency, which is predicted to increase concurrently with warming (2, 37—39). In addition, populations of tree pests, such as bark beetles, which are often the proximal cause of mortality in this species and others, are also expected to increase with future warming (7, 9, 38).
Bark beetles, such as the ones that bored into this 19 inch slash pine
and spread from there to twenty others I had to cut down to prevent further spread
of the pine beetles.
What happens when pine beetles spread
is what you see in the
first picture in this post:
acres and acres of dead red pine trees.
Monoculture slash pine plantations may show this effect most clearly,
but look around here, and you’ll see red dead loblolly and longleaf pines,
too.
The article is saying that if the beetles don’t get the trees weakened by droughts that will be much more frequent, the trees will die more quickly of suffocation, because the temperature is higher. Higher temperatures is something that should concern every Georgian in our state where forestry is the second largest industry and our forests protect our wildlife and the air that we breathe and the water that we drink.
-jsq
Fox News hired Jane Akre and a couple of other reporters as an
investigative unit and did a snazzy promo about that.
The first case they investigated was Monsanto’s bovine growth hormone, RBGH.
This is the whistleblower story behind the
Fox Can Lie lawsuit.
ITN in the U.K. reporting about Health Canada’s report on bovine growth hormone:
Monsanto’s engineered growth hormone did not comply with safety requirements. It could be absorbed by the body, and therefore did have implications for human health. Mysteriously, that conclusion was deleted from the final, published version of their report.
That was for a product that U.S. EPA had approved with little or no testing. Fox’s investigative unit had the story, but Monsanto threatened to sue Fox. Watch the video for the details.
Eventually, Akre sued Fox. She won, but Fox won on appeal. An appeal that established that Fox can lie.
-jsq
PS: Owed to Paul Hollands.
Back at the end of March at
a river conference in Roswell, Georgia,
I was interviewed for a podcast.
Here’s
the audio,
and here’s the blurb they included:
John Quarterman on the Withlachoochee
Monday, July 9th, 2012
John S. Quarterman was born and raised in Lowndes County, where he married his wife Gretchen. They live on the same land where he grew up, and participate in local community and government.
NPS talks with Quarterman and his observations on starting and strengthening a Withlachoochee Riverkeeper organization at Georgia River Network‘s 2012 Weekend for Rivers.
The water organization has since been incorporated as the Georgia non-profit WWALS Watershed Coalition:
WWALS is an advocacy organization working for watershed conservation of the Willacoochee, Withlacoochee, Alapaha, and Little River Systems watershed in south Georgia and north Florida through awareness, environmental monitoring, and citizen advocacy.
-jsq
PS: They also recorded another podcast which starts out on what may sound like a completely different topic, but which is actually quite related.
I remember when my father and I put these things there, around forty years ago. They’re still intact, and if you look closely you can still read the labels. We prefer taking things to the dump these days.
Metal can:
Metal can
John S. Quarterman, Gretchen Quarterman, Brown Dog, Yellow Dog,
Pictures by John S. Quarterman for Okra Paradise Farms, Lowndes County, Georgia, 22 July 2012.
Plastic bottle: